Undergraduate Classes

Here are my lecture notes (including exercises) of Intermediate Microeconomics with some game theory, taught at Carngie Mellon University during my visit there.  The aim is again to provide a compact and self-contained set of materials that are accessible to students of diverse mathematical preparedness, and are rigorous enough to engage their mind. I select and sequence the game theory materials to convey a sense of continuance from the main component of this course, classic decision theory, to game theory.  First come zero-sum games that can be solved as if a consumer's optimization, owing to the minimax theorem. Then are games with dominant strategies where a player can to some extent make decisions regardless of the actions of the opponents. Finally comes an introduction of Nash equilibrium, where decisions are truly interactive across players.

Here are my lecture notes (including exercises) for the non-game-theoretic part of Intermediate Microeconomics.  They are aimed at compactifying the various topics into just several chapters under a single theme of introducing the formal analysis of decision making in the pure competition context.  I found such compactification conducive to striking a balance between the goal to engage the students in nontrivial economic reasoning---mathematics an integral part of the reasoning---and the constraints imposed by the large number of students and their vastly diverse levels of preparedness in critical reasoning.  With only a few chapters to read, students would be less distracted by the burden of memorizing jargons in various topics but rather focus more on the recurring theme, which deepens along the sequence of the chapters and culminates in the epilogue that introduces the modern envelope theorem.  The unconventional sequencing of the chapters, presenting first producer theory rather than consumer theory, is motivated by the fact that producer theory is simpler in substance, with explicit objective functions and without the income effect complication, and the concern that a consumer's decision tends to sound too close to students' daily experience for them to suspend the concrete for the abstract.